Resto Druid - Legion Talents

[theburned]

Isn't that bound to happen if you get the tuned around average closer to one? And given that mastery likely isn't the best stat, but rather haste, you can actually even reduce the chance of the worst case occuring in the process.


I still don't get how they cannot see this. The buff to a 1.33 HoT "average" clearly ought to be a result of us not getting anywhere close to prior 1.66 in raid testings, this though doesn't mean, that situation where stacking is trivial will not occur (all small groups). At five stacks and just 10% mastery, you're already getting a nice boost of about 35% over other classes, merely by altering talent build/different damage patterns, with the spread getting significantly larger on mastery heavy builds (about 70% should be reasonable, maybe 80%).

5 hots simply dont happen unless you are healing 5 people at most, and even then having much more than 3-4 hots on one target, 4-6 on tank, and 2 on the rest seems to be an issue, might be easier with a few extra persitence ranks (3-5 instead of 0).

For this being super broken for cms though, tbh this might be a tad bit strong for the lower tier cms, but at higher tiers, you will rely on people not getting one shot, I am already having problems keeping people topped to 80-100% for certain abilities, on tier 7. Sadly we were a bit too tired to use our tier 8 keystone, but I can assure you that I would've had a lot more trouble on certain packs/bosses compared to lets say a resto shaman or holy paladin, while I would be better on other packs.
Now ofc I dont really expect current tuning to be standing on live, but once you reach higher tiers it will come to a point where these numbers are very realistic.
Once you reach higher lvls having some life buffers from shamans, shields/sac aura from paladin to be necessary to keep your party alive. And resto druids while strong in terms of hps, they are not a clear winner just because they have no means of making people survive abilities that deal above 101-120% blows, and also need to have a certain HoT build up to quickly get people up to necessary hp thresholds.

But yeah, while I feel like resto druid could probably be nerfed a bit I would say the target nerf should be a minor one towards rejuv, currently I see very little reason to pick properity or cenarion ward over germination in both raid and cms. In cms this makes a lot of sense, but in a raid situation I would say it should feel less punishing to pick properity/cenarion ward, in any situation where it isnt focused damage towards a few select targets. flourish feels very strong atm, both in raids and especially in 5 mans, MoC feels useful, but nothing close to flourish, and don't get me started on stonebark, while flourish is usually combined with WG it is quite a few rejuvs in the picture aswell, so a small nerf to rejuv, and a nerf to flourish (i'd expect longer cd or 1 sec less duration.)

Overall from what I've seen we're a bit stronger than other healers, but not by a super large margin.

aswell as we need a buff to the dreamwalker major trait, we should get a 3% ish buff, and a nerf netting us 3-4% less throughput than now, and I think we are on a good way to be balanced.

- - - Updated - - -

Of course it feels decents, because for most practical purposes, it doesn't change anything for live. For raid healing, one cannot reliably stack hots to begin with (Cultivation is trivial, WG/Spring Blossoms to short duration to reliably chase on more than one/two targets) and stacking for tank/focused healing is trivial in the sense, that it is what we did on live anyway. The only case which we're worse off - and can't really change anything about - is random single target burst (Why is overgrowth a PvP talent, and not a Pve talent?). That's actually why I don't get how anyone considers this mastery as "rewarding good players", when it doesn't change anything from what we've been doing anyway, just brings about a horrendous tuning problem. The recent buff indicates , that mastery tuned for an 1.66 HoT average shoul've been consistently underperforming in raidtests (otherwise how to explain the buff?) [Fun fact: that's a consequence of the crit heavy gear you mentioned, as soon as you get higher on haste, you will beat this 1.33 average consistently ... at least with spring blossoms/cultivation]. But well, I still place my hope that once they get more reliable data on mythic dungeons, they'll just scrap this mastery for got, even if any option at such a late state would be just returning to current live harmony (though this still would require gear with adequate mastery values).

Cultivation brings healing to the ones that needs it, spring blossom, idk, doesnt feel reliable enough, and also impossible to track atm, flourish though, really brings this mastery in to play, hot up a few targets, wild growth (sotf if you got it), flourish throw out a few extra hots, and tranq, if your raid somehow isnt topped up after this. Also how can you say it doesn't make you play differently, I even struggle to keep playing my old playstyle on Live, because it changes my way of playing so drastically.
Flourish really boosts the value of our mastery, because it buffs it massively abuse it when it is needed.

As for the raid testing I will only mention the first boss, because the second was just really unsuccessful and was very low focus on optimizing healing, but the first boss, the raid wide healing felt really good, my rotation was basically wild growth first time he "jumps down", build up rejuvs -> sotf -> wg -> flourish -> more rejuvs (tried to aim for poison debuffs/wild growth targets) and then tranq second time he "jumps down". Some extra tank healing and healing on debuffed targets felt like some great additional bonus for being a resto druid...

[stormgust]

5 hots simply dont happen unless you are healing 5 people at most, and even then having much more than 3-4 hots on one target, 4-6 on tank, and 2 on the rest seems to be an issue, might be easier with a few extra persitence ranks (3-5 instead of 0).

I'm aware that it doesn't hapen all that often, the problem is when it happens, it's absurd. Also, the fact that mastery value scales considerably with higher haste is a problem of it's own.

For this being super broken for cms though, tbh this might be a tad bit strong for the lower tier cms, but at higher tiers, you will rely on people not getting one shot, I am already having problems keeping people topped to 80-100% for certain abilities, on tier 7. Upping it to 8 or 9 and I would have no way of dealing with bosses like hymdall, with his 70-80% hp shouts at tier 7. Now ofc I dont really expect current tuning to be standing on live, but once you reach higher lvls having some life buffers from shamans, shields/sac aura from paladin to be necessary to keep your party alive.

That's a problem inherent with Ancenstral Vigor and Devotion Aura though and more or less hardblocks anyone but those two specs from progressing further (and not exclussive to CM's to be honest, but also problematic in raids). Still, druids would be significantly better until this roadblock (and join hpriest/mw in being useless past that point).

But yeah, while I feel like resto druid could probably be nerfed a bit

Just skimmed over the logs, but there wasn't really a clear picture on any class (but hpriests with broken PoM) pulling that far ahead, maybe a small tendency in favor of pallys for tank damage heavy fights (even given our mastery we don't seem to be that strong on currently, but that's what you get when due to mastery, our direct heals have relatively low coefficients and thus are rather weak relative to other classes, at least unless we get somewhat high mastery values - which shouldn't happen too soon)

I would say the target nerf should be a minor one towards rejuv,

Because that worked out so well the last three times they did it for a similar reason? Nah, honestly not.

currently I see very little reason to pick properity or cenarion ward over germination in both raid and cms.

That's because prosperity is garbage without 4T19, slightly more flexibility on a medium CD spell with limited use spell is hardly ever worth it, especially when another option on the same tier offers something similar with less restrictive use (CW) - it's just beyond me why it hasn't been redesigned yet. Similarily, while CW offers high throughput on paper, it's also restrictive in it's uses: It usually falls into a similar role as a non-AoE used SM (i.e. no 4T19/SotF), while on top of that being slightly harder to use. The flexibility germination offers - even more so given our mastery - simply always wins here. They really should consider moving Germination onto the Spring Blossoms/Cultivation tier (and add +reju duration back onto it), and obviously just scrapping Prosperity and Inner Peace.

flourish feels very strong atm, both in raids and especially in 5 mans, MoC feels useful, but nothing close to flourish,

Yeah, but that's more a problem with flourish being too strong for its current tier. It really either should be placed onto the Spring Blossoms/Cultivation one (as it similarly to those provides higher outgoing HoT stacks - also, this tier currently lacks an active ability), or placed alongside SotF/ToL (though SotF still is weak due to the SM change). Of course in the first case Germination cannot be placed there, but with an adequate duration increase to reju, may also work out on the ToL/SotF tier.

and don't get me started on stonebark

Too weak, though may be reasonable when placed next to CW. Regardless, we still would need a third option for this tier (maybe MoC at +1 additional stack?).

So to sumarize maybe they should try either (I'd prefer the first due to it having the active option on T90 - and that was one of their goals for this expansion's talent redesign:
CW, Stonebark, MoC
SotF, ToL, Germ
SB, Cult, Flourish

or
CW, Stonebark, MoC
SotF, ToL, Flourish
SB, Cult, Germ

Regardless: Abundance, Prosperity, Inner Peace are lost causes, and we effectively need an entire new talent tier designed.

Overall from what I've seen we're a bit stronger than other healers, but not by a super large margin.

I'd say it's way to early to draw any conclusion. If anything, I'd actually like blizzard to do another pass on all healer talent tree's first. It simply shouldn't be the case, that most attention is given to DD's, with some being in for their second pass already (and those aren't even the specs which recieved major redesigns this expansion).

aswell as we need a buff to the dreamwalker major trait, we should get a 3% ish buff, and a nerf netting us 3-4% less throughput than now, and I think we are on a good way to be balanced.

They don't need to buff it, they just need to fix it to not be scaling of attack power (which has been the case for about two months now ... so much for reading our feedback).

Cultivation brings healing to the ones that needs it, spring blossom

I think those two are fine, the first is more for spread/bursty fights, whereas the second ought to be used on stacked/more consistent damage.

Also how can you say it doesn't make you play differently, I even struggle to keep playing my old playstyle on Live, because it changes my way of playing so drastically.

Would you play differently without flourish though, and furthermore, would you also play that way on live even with the current live harmony? Or to put it differently, did you accomodate your playstyle to fit the new mastery, or did you in fact just adapt to flourish extending your HoTs? The way you describe it, you just accomodated for flourish.

because the second was just really unsuccessful and was very low focus on optimizing healing,

Well, seems like no raiddev ever encountered a dual dragon spawn back in vanilla. Otherwise they wouldn't have done that :>

[theburned]

I'm aware that it doesn't hapen all that often, the problem is when it happens, it's absurd. Also, the fact that mastery value scales considerably with higher haste is a problem of it's own.

When it happens you are spending lots of gcds on that one target or a lot of mana, it has a lot of drawbacks and not really an issue, unless we get a dreamwalker (?) boss. Exponential scaling is obviously an issue.

Just skimmed over the logs, but there wasn't really a clear picture on any class (but hpriests with broken PoM) pulling that far ahead, maybe a small tendency in favor of pallys for tank damage heavy fights (even given our mastery we don't seem to be that strong on currently, but that's what you get when due to mastery, our direct heals have relatively low coefficients and thus are rather weak relative to other classes, at least unless we get somewhat high mastery values - which shouldn't happen too soon)

holy priests was obviously a bug and holy priests doing 4x the healing of other healers, and its just a pointless discussion. I at least felt a lot stronger, might've been because I've become a lot more accustomed to the playstyle, on top of being quite a bit better geared than the rest + mastery buff.

Yeah, but that's more a problem with flourish being too strong for its current tier. It really either should be placed onto the Spring Blossoms/Cultivation one (as it similarly to those provides higher outgoing HoT stacks - also, this tier currently lacks an active ability), or placed alongside SotF/ToL (though SotF still is weak due to the SM change). Of course in the first case Germination cannot be placed there, but with an adequate duration increase to reju, may also work out on the ToL/SotF tier.

I can see that working, but then again would it be strong enough, eitherway that is a duration issue, the talent can easily be buffed to buff spell for a longer duration if it's too weak. I would say it's all about a talent philosophy for blizzard, they seem to aim for clear winners in certain situations, to keep away from that one single talent combination being the best.

CW, Stonebark, MoC
SotF, ToL, Flourish
SB, Cult, Germ

Regardless: Abundance, Prosperity, Inner Peace are lost causes, and we effectively need an entire new talent tier designed.

Tbh prosperity does not look that horrible tiered up with CW and stonebark, I'd consider prosperity over CW in high tier cms (CW would just be too slow.) and raiding due to its single target burst potential, and aoe boost with sotf, at that point its synergy with sotf and tier would probably put it way above the 2 others, at which point MoC would be better to have in that tier, but 1 extra charge pr proc does not sound like good enough to compete with CW, perhaps something like "making your 2 next regrowths heal for 10% more and cost no mana." the 10% number easily tunable to put them more in line.

Inner peace feels like a niche talent, which gives some good utility, and I can see it being good in certain cases, especially with the trait. Yet to play around with it though. Abundance is lost because it doesnt buff any good spells, not sure why anyone would think it would be a good idea to add a glyph which people won't pick over utility as a talent, at least he should be fired.
SB, Cult, Germ with persistence I dont really know if 3 sec extra is the way to go, but could put flourish closer to ToL/SotF.
The issue now is that we have an entierly open talent row.

I'd say it's way to early to draw any conclusion. If anything, I'd actually like blizzard to do another pass on all healer talent tree's first. It simply shouldn't be the case, that most attention is given to DD's, with some being in for their second pass already (and those aren't even the specs which recieved major redesigns this expansion).

Hmm probably right, I haven't really been checking too much around, overall healing balance doesn't seem too off if you count out disc priests.

They don't need to buff it, they just need to fix it to not be scaling of attack power (which has been the case for about two months now ... so much for reading our feedback).

Right, can remember seeing weird numbers when I saw the numbers in catform.

Would you play differently without flourish though, and furthermore, would you also play that way on live even with the current live harmony? Or to put it differently, did you accomodate your playstyle to fit the new mastery, or did you in fact just adapt to flourish extending your HoTs? The way you describe it, you just accomodated for flourish.

The part where I started playing differently on live happened before I started using flourish on alpha. (no point in putting a spell I wouldn't manage to use on my bars.)
I do play differently without flourish aswell, but flourish enhances the effect of the different approach, just generally sniping wild growths with 2 rejuvs aswell.
I definitely don't think it is optimal to play like this on live, but live does not have a serious mana limitation, aswell as heals doing so much so stacking rejuv on top of a wild growth will mostly result in a lot of overhealing. It's just that my playstyle was focused on legion, so I used it on live without thinking too much about it, definitely not a good thing.

[stormgust]

When it happens you are spending lots of gcds on that one target or a lot of mana, it has a lot of drawbacks and not really an issue, unless we get a dreamwalker (?) boss. Exponential scaling is obviously an issue.

Does it really cost more GCD's and mana though? Unless you switch to regrowth (and in that case, you'd have MoC), it's just readjusting how you distribute your GCD's for up to a 70% performance gain (over other classes, given high mastery).

I would say it's all about a talent philosophy for blizzard, they seem to aim for clear winners in certain situations, to keep away from that one single talent combination being the best.

Yeah, that's one aspect of the new talent design philosophy, the other being to allow for choosing between a more active and passive playstyle (complexity). The druid tree fails quite miserably on both goals though, with three of our four performance tiers offering a obvious choice in most (>90%) situations, one of that being conditional on 4T19.

Inner peace feels like a niche talent

Thing is, it already is niche, and just becomes worse throughout the expansion due to not scaling with mastery, nor being impacted by haste.

The part where I started playing differently on live happened before I started using flourish on alpha. (no point in putting a spell I wouldn't manage to use on my bars.) I do play differently without flourish aswell, but flourish enhances the effect of the different approach, just generally sniping wild growths with 2 rejuvs aswell.
I definitely don't think it is optimal to play like this on live, but live does not have a serious mana limitation, aswell as heals doing so much so stacking rejuv on top of a wild growth will mostly result in a lot of overhealing.

I've trouble making sense out of that, before you said you actively chase WG target, now you say you're evading them (due to overhealing). That just sounds more like playing according to a restricted mana pool, and not actively making decisions based on mastery.

[Torty]

I've done some quests to get better stats. Results: stats http://i.imgur.com/IwVPTAx.png (scaled to 875 ilvl) and spells http://i.imgur.com/wb42iHT.png (for all traits, I obviously have nowhere near all traits, more like 4 traits total).

For those that did raid test, how does healing feel in such cases with upscaled gear? Does it still retain the triage style, or do you manage to keep everyone topped off at all times?

I've recorded some tests. It's really hard to tell, because for me those are very late at night (start at 23:30 and end at like 2), no interface and medium to horrible lag. These 3 combined really make for not so good performance ;p I was kinda trying to burn through mana on majority of the pulls for us to last longer and missed a lot of crucial uptimes, doesn't help that you can only see 3 hots max and can't see hot from Efflo. On Ilgynoth I was in moonkin form for phase 1 for us to make the push, so it might be interesting for people that are wondering how off-dpsing works. The damage was pretty good, but it really burns through mana (each of the dots cost ~20-25k mana). I can see Feral Affinity being a more mana neutral dps option, but you can dispell and plant Efflo while in Moonkin. At the moment Efflo is kinda overpowered so you still do some healing while dpsing.

Elerethe Renferal from last night (kill) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUoOW6WZUJQ

Il'gynoth (wipe) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlwHx0plU5k

Spellblade Aluriel (wipe) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFjYg7YrL2k

[stormgust]

I really don't get some people on the alpha feedback thread. Just because right now they pull adequate numbers and it doesn't feel clunky, they're now happy with how rdruids are looking for legion. Honestly, the core gameplay never was much of a problem, it has been quite solid for several expansions now, and thus should also be for this expansion. Of course it's gonna feel fine, if it's tuned to do so (it can - we know that already).

The major problem with our toolkit has always been, wether it will be adequately tuned post tuning phase and the track record, i.e. shortly before xpax release reju nerfs, doesn't bode well here. That should be where concerns should lie, especially given that our new mastery adds a rather complex scaling issue to the problem.
In essence, it's that a lot of people seem to ignore one tiny, but really important fact when providing feedback: There is no guarantee, that feeling good and being balanced can be achieved simultaneously. You always should figure out wether your class is balanced in the overall picture, and if not, which mechanic is the outlier and how you will perform once it is brought back in line (even if blizzard always tells us to not care about numbers for now - it's simply bad feedback to not consider such things).

The other problem, which sadly has not seen much attentiont throughout alpha to this date, is the somewhat sorry state of our talent tree. I really don't get why no one seems to care much about the apparent lack of choices there. As it stands, we're likely stuck with a Displacer Beast/Germination/Flourish/ToL build for the entire xpac, with a small alteration being 4T19 (to a Prosp/SotF/Flourish build - so this is quite restrictive in use and may only apple on a handful of encounters) - the only real choice so far seems to be T90 (and maybe affinity tier).

[Nerxyrall]

The other problem, which sadly has not seen much attentiont throughout alpha to this date, is the somewhat sorry state of our talent tree. I really don't get why no one seems to care much about the apparent lack of choices there. As it stands, we're likely stuck with a Displacer Beast/Germination/Flourish/ToL build for the entire xpac, with a small alteration being 4T19 (to a Prosp/SotF/Flourish build - so this is quite restrictive in use and may only apple on a handful of encounters) - the only real choice so far seems to be T90 (and maybe affinity tier).

While i agree to a large degree with your concerns, i think that many dont really care about choices, if they get something nice they like.
I can obviously only speak for myself, but to not "have to" change talents etc every encounter or every tier isn´t a big concern of mine. I honestly kinda like it. (Especially as a second specc.) I dont have to "relearn" to play, if i have to change big things regularly.
For more casual players it is just more convenient.
For people like you, who are heavy on the theory, minmaxing etc i can totally understand that you want choices, but for many others it just doesnt really matter, because the overal toolkit right know "feels" nice and strong and fun.

Like i said i personally dont reeeealy care, but they promised choices etc and should deliver. I just wanted to try explaining why you see nobody caring.

[theburned]

Does it really cost more GCD's and mana though? Unless you switch to regrowth (and in that case, you'd have MoC), it's just readjusting how you distribute your GCD's for up to a 70% performance gain (over other classes, given high mastery).

Yeah, that's one aspect of the new talent design philosophy, the other being to allow for choosing between a more active and passive playstyle (complexity). The druid tree fails quite miserably on both goals though, with three of our four performance tiers offering a obvious choice in most (>90%) situations, one of that being conditional on 4T19.

Thing is, it already is niche, and just becomes worse throughout the expansion due to not scaling with mastery, nor being impacted by haste.

That just sounds more like playing according to a restricted mana pool, and not actively making decisions based on mastery.

I mean you spend a lot of gcds putting lots of healing into one target, sure if that target takes a lot of continous damage (think fenryr bleed in HoV) then its easily worth it and very strong, but often in a raid situation you have other people focusing those who take a lot of damage.

Tranq gets a 20% buff with the trait at which point I still think it will be a good niche for quite a while. (with the legendary item boosting it somewhat aswell for a little oomph in later tiers.)

The mastery was created with a restricted mana pool in mind, so utilizing our mastery to better handle a restricted mana pool is actively making decisions based on mastery.

I've trouble making sense out of that, before you said you actively chase WG target (On alpha), now you say you're evading them (due to overhealing).(On Live)

I would call that a change of playstyle.


Though I still feel the mastery forces us into germination, flourish and has and affects inner peace too little, it could perhaps add a small hot to tranq, it doesnt have to do a lot apart from add a mastery stack.

[Tiberria]

We are not supposed to be able to cast Efflo while in Moonkin Form. It has been working in Moonkin Form on and off during some Alpha builds, but Hamlet/Sigma specifically said in a post that this is a bug and that HT is the only spell that is supposed to be usable in Moonkin Form. We can assume that will be fixed again and we won't be able to do any healing in Moonkin.

Sure, Feral Affinity might be an option for mana free DPS. However, (1) it doesn't seem to be tuned to do anywhere near as much DPS as Balance Affinity currently - unclear if this is a bug or not (2) unless they decide to give us melee immunity - at least with that talent or in Cat Form, it won't matter in a lot of cases if it's a superior option, because fight mechanics won't allow you to risk being in melee range as a ranged spec.

- - - Updated - - -

The other problem, which sadly has not seen much attentiont throughout alpha to this date, is the somewhat sorry state of our talent tree. I really don't get why no one seems to care much about the apparent lack of choices there. As it stands, we're likely stuck with a Displacer Beast/Germination/Flourish/ToL build for the entire xpac, with a small alteration being 4T19 (to a Prosp/SotF/Flourish build - so this is quite restrictive in use and may only apple on a handful of encounters) - the only real choice so far seems to be T90 (and maybe affinity tier).

I don't really agree with you that we have only 1 real option on the talent rows that you mentioned. The only talent of the 4 you mentioned that I would consider close to 100% automatic is Displacer Beast - the rest of that talent row is a mess.

However,
- I don't think Germination is an automatic choice, and don't even think it's superior to Cenarion Ward currently on Alpha for a lot of situations/damage patterns. The only thing you get from Germination is the extra mastery healing on targets you choose to double up Rejuvs on. Regardless of the mastery healing, doing that isn't always going to be optimal. Even if you want to focus tank healing, you can argue that CW is in some ways a better option, because it gives you single target emergency burst when you need it over slightly more passive healing. Also, Prosperity will be very viable if the current 4 piece interaction is left in place.
- Mana longevity is extremely tenuous (across all healing specs for the most part) on Alpha currently. Flourish is a talent that adds a lot of throughput but requires burning a lot of mana to take proper advantage of it. Meanwhile, Moment of Clarity has the potential to increase your net mana longevity by 10-12%. It's hard to map out on paper, but if mana longevity is at all a limiting factor, MoC could well be better than Flourish on some fights.
- I could also see SoTF overtake Tree in a lot of situations. It certainly likely will if the current 4 piece/Flourish/Prosperity interactions stay as is. Outside of that, it still could be an option. The only thing that made Tree conclusively overtake SoTF in WOD was the synergy with the 4 piece and class trinket. Pre-HFC, it was very debatable whether SoTF was better than Tree on most fights. If you don't need a full 30 seconds of buffed healing every 3 minutes, a lot of Tree gets wasted, and in some damage patterns, it is actually better to have a less potent boost every 30 seconds.

I think the biggest problem isn't necessarily that we have NO choices, but that we have certain talents - i.e. Stonebark, Abundance, Renewal which are so completely dreadful that there is almost no situation I can think of them being used.

[stormgust]

We are not supposed to be able to cast Efflo while in Moonkin Form. It has been working in Moonkin Form on and off during some Alpha builds, but Hamlet/Sigma specifically said in a post that this is a bug and that HT is the only spell that is supposed to be usable in Moonkin Form. We can assume that will be fixed again and we won't be able to do any healing in Moonkin.

Well, they didn't get around to fixing Dreamwalker within two months, so who knows wether they get around to fixing that one again.

- I don't think Germination is an automatic choice, and don't even think it's superior to Cenarion Ward currently on Alpha for a lot of situations/damage patterns.

I'm probably extremely sceptical of this being the case, because on live, it usually wasn't considered a choice over something as simple as Ysera's gift.
The flexiblity provided by Germination - it's not really only a mastery stack, but that you can distribute your GCD'S/HPS significantly better across targets - just seems worth more than this additionial, conditionally triggered, single target burst heal.

The only thing you get from Germination is the extra mastery healing on targets you choose to double up Rejuvs on.

It's actually more than that, also provide a higher flexibility in how you distribute your HPS over targets.

Also, Prosperity will be very viable if the current 4 piece interaction is left in place.

That I wasn't even arguing against, it's just that it's more or less worthless without 4P.

- Mana longevity is extremely tenuous (across all healing specs for the most part) on Alpha currently. Flourish is a talent that adds a lot of throughput but requires burning a lot of mana to take proper advantage of it.

Flourish being free to cast, inherently has it provide longevity. If you're mana starved, there's no need to use Flourish to maximize throughput, you can just extended a WG, or a handful of rejus/lb provides free throughput, and merely extending a WG - depending on efficiency of those extended HoTs - can be equal to about three regrowths.

- I could also see SoTF overtake Tree in a lot of situations.
...
Pre-HFC, it was very debatable whether SoTF was better than Tree on most fights. If you don't need a full 30 seconds of buffed healing every 3 minutes, a lot of Tree gets wasted, and in some damage patterns, it is actually better to have a less potent boost every 30 seconds.

Probably true, though I personally believe, that this 30s damage pattern will occur quite rarely, as it's really neither deadly burst, nor consistent mana draining damage - so I'd still prefer if they just returned it to buffing every other WG like it it on live.

It certainly likely will if the current 4 piece/Flourish/Prosperity interactions stay as is.

To be honest, most of us would agree, that this combination should've long been removed.

I think the biggest problem isn't necessarily that we have NO choices, but that we have certain talents - i.e. Stonebark, Abundance, Renewal which are so completely dreadful that there is almost no situation I can think of them being used.

That would've probably been a better way to word it.

[Tiberria]

The reason why Ysera's Gift is a virtually automatic choice over CW on live is
1. It adds throughput with 0 mana cost - CW costs mana
2. It adds throughput with 0 GCD cost - CW uses GCDs
3. It adds more raw throughput by close to a 2:1 or 3:1 margin over CW
4. YG essentially has overheal protection - it will always heal an injured target. CW has a high propensity to heavily overheal because of how over the top healer throughput is on live, and the time for it to activate plus the duration of the HoT.

The only one that is still relevant in Legion is (4). Assuming you have 15% mastery rating on your gear, CW adds more throughput than Germination until you average 12 Germination HoTs up at a time. Of course, that's impossible, since that would be 24 active Rejuvs, and we cap out at about 8-10 active Rejuvs at a time (so 4-5 Germinations max) considering other stuff (Efflo, WG, SM, OOC procs) that we need to keep up. CW is nearly 300% of the raw throughput of Germination (with the best use case for Germination), and 450% the raw throughput if you link every second CW with Flourish. Basically, as long as you can effectively keep CW overheal under 67%, it will always beat Germination from the perspective of effective throughput. With the buff to stamina health pools relative to healing power, people being bursted 0% to 100% shouldn't be anywhere near as quick in Legion as it is on live, which in theory should make CW more able to be used more effectively.

And while Germination gives you more damage pattern/healing flexibility, CW gives you more emergency healing/single target burst flexibility. This is something that can very often be the difference between someone living or dying and also an inherent weakness of the Druid kit - especially with the new mastery, 30 sec SM CD, removal of Genesis and NS, etc. I strongly suspect that unless you are assigned to turret focusing tanks full time or something that CW will be the superior choice over Germination most of the time. Germination is certainly not a default selection.

[Nevcairiel]

Well, they didn't get around to fixing Dreamwalker within two months, so who knows wether they get around to fixing that one again.

Everytime they post a new build thread, I mostly see people ranting about mastery, utility, talents, or what have you, maybe someone should make a singular concise post just with the dreamwalker scaling bug in it, instead of being a burried side-note between all the other complaints? A clear and simple bug should hopefully get a bit more attention.

Once they invite me when beta starts I'll do that, if its not fixed by then. They should totally start inviting addon authors sooner rather than later, but what can you do, their choice when to process that list.

[Cheze]

I kinda feel like they should just make ToL baseline and replace it in the tree with something more equivalent in utility to the SotF (and now abundance.) Burst cooldowns are just too valuable to not take, especially when rdruid already becomes so monstrously efficient in 'steady healing' situations

[theburned]

Stuff.

great to hear, I think we're done here, you are defending totally different talents than I would. So I can at least agree that most tiers are fairly okay, just that we have a couple of useless talents, abundance and stonebark. Renewal probably has its uses on fights where a blink provides you nothing.

[stormgust]

great to hear, I think we're done here, you are defending totally different talents than I would. So I can at least agree that most tiers are fairly okay,

I wouldn't call one mostly dead talent per tier "fairly okay". I can get one or two across the entire talent tree being bad, but as it stands, it's quite abit more than that:
Prosperity [I don't buy the 4T19 argument - a talent should stand on its own, and not require excessive correlation from a setbonus/other effects to work out]
Abundance [The only good thing about this one is its name...]
Stonebark [What's the use of more frequent tank cd's, if the neccessity of tank cd's, by an underlying paradigm shift, was severely reduced?]
Wild Charge [Can you still charge yourself through voidzones to stack debuffs using wildcharge? That and a max range well below usual healing range is, what has this talent pale compared to displacer beast]
Feral Affinity [did they at least add melee immunity similar to pally/mistweaver for this one?]

Then are some which I'm not quite sure wether they're ever going to be picked (there may be this one fight throughout the xpac, but that's too rare):
Renewal [About one patchwork fight per raidtier, and only if lucky, that one requires no movement for healers]
Inner Peace [scales badly throughout the xpac, highly situational due to the need for CD reduction to align with encounter mechanics, the alternatives provide steady, free throughput, and a rather noticeable gain on mastery uptime]
MoC [In most cases, +6s on WG will save you more mana than those additional regrowths, and that's not yet counting any other HoTs which may get extended]

[theburned]

I wouldn't call one mostly dead talent per tier "fairly okay". I can get one or two across the entire talent tree being bad, but as it stands, it's quite abit more than that:
Prosperity [I don't buy the 4T19 argument - a talent should stand on its own, and not require excessive correlation from a setbonus/other effects to work out]
Abundance [The only good thing about this one is its name...]
Stonebark [What's the use of more frequent tank cd's, if the neccessity of tank cd's, by an underlying paradigm shift, was severely reduced?]
Wild Charge [Can you still charge yourself through voidzones to stack debuffs using wildcharge? That and a max range well below usual healing range is, what has this talent pale compared to displacer beast]
Feral Affinity [did they at least add melee immunity similar to pally/mistweaver for this one?]

Then are some which I'm not quite sure wether they're ever going to be picked (there may be this one fight throughout the xpac, but that's too rare):
Renewal [About one patchwork fight per raidtier, and only if lucky, that one requires no movement for healers]
Inner Peace [scales badly throughout the xpac, highly situational due to the need for CD reduction to align with encounter mechanics, the alternatives provide steady, free throughput, and a rather noticeable gain on mastery uptime]
MoC [In most cases, +6s on WG will save you more mana than those additional regrowths, and that's not yet counting any other HoTs which may get extended]

During alpha having 2 choices pr talent tier, definitely classifies as "fairly okay" it's not perfect, but on the other hand it is better than what we have on live, where its 2 talents pr tier.
Prosperity being balanced around 4pT19 and it being good, I am not sure it would be the best choice even, often it can be too much, where as the other talents can still be good, so that we have 3 choices with tier pieces, rather than it being the outstanding talent.
more frequent tank cd's when the paradigm shift which should reduce the availability of externals makes perfect sense, the talent is just not competitive.
Wild charge has a lower cd with high restrictions, and some versatility in other forms, while I disagree those 15 sec rarely makes a difference. As for Renewal most fights are not balanced around needing a blink, so playing better to get a free 600k++ instant (off-gcd if it wasnt removed) heal feels perfectly fine. Though I would perhaps want a few changes to balance the tier better something like 1 min cd renewal, 45 sec displacer, 15 sec wild charge, should put them more in line, displacer should still be a very strong talent, but the gain from picking the other talents should be quite a bit higher.
I'd like to see an interrupt in feral affinity, would make the talent situational.

Inner peace as I've agreed that its a bit weak, but yea a small 5-10% hot would probably put the talent in a very good position, and would help it scale.

[Nerxyrall]

Wild charge has a lower cd with high restrictions, and some versatility in other forms, while I disagree those 15 sec rarely makes a difference. As for Renewal most fights are not balanced around needing a blink, so playing better to get a free 600k++ instant (off-gcd if it wasnt removed) heal feels perfectly fine. Though I would perhaps want a few changes to balance the tier better something like 1 min cd renewal, 45 sec displacer, 15 sec wild charge, should put them more in line, displacer should still be a very strong talent, but the gain from picking the other talents should be quite a bit higher.

I think 45 sec displayer would be a wrong move.
We allready lost mobility, i think it would be to harsh to loose even more.

As you statet, in fights where mobility isnt an issue renewal is a good and solid choice.

Instead of nerfing Displacer i would like wild charge buffed.

Just give it more range. Displacer is 20(25?!?dont know)y. Give it 40y(Only the Casterform "charge to somebody" and with the lower cd it would be competitive.
Harder to use, but for experienced players in many situations better.
For PVP 40y would probably be to much, since RestoDruid is always very strong here. With maybe 30y + the versatitlity of the talent it could still be a competitive choice.

Edit: Also the talent will probably be the same for all specs, so while Resto could "get away" with 45 sec displacer , Moonkin would have a much harder time.

[theburned]

I think 45 sec displayer would be a wrong move.
We allready lost mobility, i think it would be to harsh to loose even more.

As you statet, in fights where mobility isnt an issue renewal is a good and solid choice.

Instead of nerfing Displacer i would like wild charge buffed.

Just give it more range. Displacer is 20(25?!?dont know).

Edit: Also the talent will probably be the same for all specs, so while Resto could "get away" with 45 sec displacer , Moonkin would have a much harder time.

Displacer is actually 20yds + 5 from boomkin affinity, while wild charge is 25 + 5 from affinity.

Resto druid mobility is very high, with wild growth being and regrowth being the only used spells with a cast time, and tranq being castable on the move (with trait.) which was one very important use of displacer beast. Lets start by having this a resto druid discussion, I don't see why you'd have to change the cd on moonkin DB aswell either. (I believe they also have increased mobility with the revamp, might be wrong on this though.)

[Nerxyrall]

Displacer is actually 20yds + 5 from boomkin affinity, while wild charge is 25 + 5 from affinity.

Resto druid mobility is very high, with wild growth being and regrowth being the only used spells with a cast time, and tranq being castable on the move (with trait.) which was one very important use of displacer beast. Lets start by having this a resto druid discussion, I don't see why you'd have to change the cd on moonkin DB aswell either. (I believe they also have increased mobility with the revamp, might be wrong on this though.)

Thanks for the clarification.

Still my point that this talent will proably be used by all specs stands. (Moonkin lost Roar but you have more means to instant cast. But theres also...lets dont get offtopic^^)

But if you only look at Resto then i think they could live with 45sec displacer. Still think a little more range to Wild Charge(Still only the Caster-Part) would make it more competitive as a talent.

[stormgust]

Prosperity being balanced around 4pT19 and it being good, I am not sure it would be the best choice even, often it can be too much, where as the other talents can still be good, so that we have 3 choices with tier pieces, rather than it being the outstanding talent.

I still don't see why a talent should be judged on grounds of a setbonus making it worthwhile. It's going to be garbage for most part of the expansion. And even for the part where it's "competitive" due 4T19, it always is subject to damage patterns actually allowing us to adequately use it.

more frequent tank cd's when the paradigm shift which should reduce the availability of externals makes perfect sense, the talent is just not competitive.

You don't go around reducing tank self defense CD's in strength, go to all other healing specs and nerf their tank CD's, and leave one class with an option to get a disproportionally strong tank CD. Either it's going to trivialize stuff because it provides utility no one else has access to, or it requires druid to cheat some mechanics, if the tankdamage is tuned according to Stonebark, or it's entirely meaningless, because you survive anyway. To me, that's completely inconsistent design.


Anyway, I've seen Tiberria suggesting swapping Abundance and Germination on the alpha boards, and definitely agree with that. The problem with that though is, as Kriellya adequately describes, that the only talent actually competing with Abundance is Prosperity without synergy.